I want my animation to have a cel shaded style to it. The reason for this is because the theme of the animation will be quite comical and humorous, so going for a cartoon look will definitely fit well that.

As for how I do it I will be using the Toon Shader in Maya to give my animation the cel shaded style. I’m not sure whether to have thick or thin lines, but I will experiment when I get closer to the end.

When it comes to characters I really like those with a simplistic design to them. In my mind, with a simplistic character you can pretty much do anything with whether it be a stick man or a ball with hands. In mind of my character I want him to resemble ‘Morph’ a little bit, the big head and glove like hands will allow to save time when creating him Maya. As for his design I’m going go for the standard red shirt, blue trousers and black/grey shoes combo.

During my animation the viewer will be able to see what the character will be thinking. This will be executed in a thought bubble where a mini version acts out the various of scenarios that the character thinks off. As for it’s style, as well as what will appear in the thought bubble, will be stick figures. This is mostly due to the fact that I can animate them very easily, but also it won’t be very time constraining when making them.

In this clip of RWBY, you can see the character Nora over exaggerating about what will happen if they loose their match. This is something that my character will inherit during the end of my animation, where he begins to imagine different scenarios that could potentially ruin the date.

Today I started to model my character in Maya, and lets just say it didn’t go well. At first it seemed okay I did the sketches for reference the body was coming along nicely, but after modelling the arm I came to realise that my sketches weren’t to the correct proportion that I originally planned. I also decided that I was only going to model the top half of the body seen as the characters legs won’t really show up in the animation.

As I tried to move the arm into the correct position I realised the arms in the bottom sketch were not positioned correctly and that when I looked at my modelled arm there wasn’t any elbow. I tried to work around it by adding edge loops to shape the elbow but it didn’t come out well.

So in an attempt to fix my mistakes, I decided to scrap my the model and start again with a pre-drawn character with a similar body type to my character (curtsy of my tutor Andy). This attempt looks a lot more promising with the body looking a lot better than it did. I’ll be in early to model the arm to showcase it.

So yeah here’s a very rough and very messy storyboard of my animation. This was all done in Photoshop which I realised halfway through I couldn’t done a lot easier in TV Paint if I had thought about, but hey ho it’s done. Next thing on my list Modelling.

For the environment of my animation it’s going to take place at a bar. Originally I was intending on having my character sit at the bar, waiting for the date to arrive. But i figured that it would be a lot simpler for the character top sit at a table and have the background look like a bar. This way I would save time on creating an entire bar/pub whatever you want to call it, and just focus on getting the character into the scene.

So today I took the chance to mess around with a pre-rigged character to see how difficult moving a full rigged character was. Safe to say it was quite easy to pick up, the controllers were easy to manipulate and because my character in my animation will be stationary throughout the film all I’ll have to animate the hands, arms and head, so I’m pretty confident to have the character as a 3D model.

My only concern is that, looking at the character is seems to have a lot of controllers attach to it, which could take quite some time to do. This is something that isn’t quite bothering me that much because most of the scene is going to low poly which shouldn’t take too long, so I’ll have enough time to model and rig a character. But still it’s something I should take into consideration throughout the project.

Here we have my character for the Monologue Project in his colourised state. I’m not too impressed with the arms and legs, but I like it, besides this is just visualisation he’ll be 3D when I put him in Maya.

As for the project I’m going to spend some time messing around with a pre-rigged character seeing how a fully rigged character handles in Maya. On top of this I’m going to a character sheet for my character here, with different expressions and what not. So look forward to that.